Friday, November 30, 2012

Holy Sense of Humor, Batman! (And a Special Message Too!)

Greetings, WYMOP readers!I know you all came here to read a quick little story, but before I get to that there is a little something I have to take care of -- it's actually a week overdue!If you have been a reader for a while, or even if you are a new reader who's gone back to read the archives, you may have noticed that I don't get a whole lot of Comments. Not for the number of Posts there are on this blog, and not considering that, as of this writing, WYMOP has logged over 16,000 page views. I do love to hear from my readers, I love it a lot, but Comments are, for the most part, few and far between here in my little corner of the universe.However:I do get comments from time to time on Facebook, where I put a weekly link to my Posts. Between there and here, someone out there has distinguished themselves as WYMOP's #1 fan. That fan had a birthday more than a week ago -- right on Thanksgiving day, 11/22/2012.Happy birthday, Kaye! Please, hit the play button below to get your special birthday message.Once again, I apologize for the huge blank space below the player -- I have no idea how to get rid of it yet!Scroll down for today's story.

So anyway, here's the story:

As you may or may not know, I work with a guy I’ll refer to here as PW. PW is… well… let’s just say he’s ‘vertically challenged’. He has ‘height issues’. He’s ‘smallness enhanced’. He carries ‘a high factor of growth resistance’. He’s a ‘good thing’ because he’d fit into the right sized package.

In a word, he’s short.

But to compensate for his lack of height, he has ‘an overabundance of violent reactive tendencies’. He has ‘explosive personality disorder’. He has ‘negative emotion control issues’.

In a word, he has a temper.

More than a temper, he’s like (this one’s for the serious Geeks out there) the old Hulk mixed with the new Hulk. You wouldn’t like him when he’s angry… and he’s always angry.

That PC crap above was just to give me something to chuckle about. What I’m talking about is an angry little man. He works for the USPS as a letter carrier.

Going Postal, anyone?PW, this angry little man, is under a Special Route Inspection this week. The ‘Special’ in that sentence applies to the Inspection, not the Route. PW requested this inspection himself, but that doesn’t mean he’s happy about it. Quite the opposite, in fact: being under a special, five-day inspection is just about the most stressful thing a mailman in this country can do. Now this may sound horrible, but for the rest of us in the office this has been a source of both entertainment and morbid fascination. Picture a bunch of guys watching an ancient boiler in the basement of an old building that’s been turned way, way up and then left unattended. The pressure’s building, there’s no one to hit the relief valves, the needle on the pressure gauge is climbing into the red and we’re all just waiting for it to blow.

This gauge, though, doesn’t have one of those tiny slivers of red that you usually see. This one has a huge red zone — nearly half the gauge!

To our surprise (and, yes, pride in him) he’s done quite well all week long. He’s never lost his temper once, never even given the appearance of being close… unless you know him. If you know him then you;re used to reading ‘The Face’.

The Face, as it is called around our office, is the expression that is usually plastered to the front of PW’s head. It is a Face of anger. It is a Face of disapproval with the world. It is a Face that ranges in expression from ‘I hate the world and everyone in it’, to ‘I just chomped my tongue while biting into a really sour pickle just as I smelled the world’s most rancid fart that I know came from my greatest enemy in the world (and the bastard did it on purpose), and all that just happened to coincide with the onset of explosive stomach trouble hitting just as I figured out that the long sliding step I just took was me treading in a fresh pile of dog dirt that splashed up onto the pant leg of my best suit just as I was walking into church’.

Yeah. It’s that kind of Face.So PW has been wearing The Face all week long, like the darkest thundercloud you’ve ever seen scudding along really close to the ground. A thundercloud that’s being followed closely by a man with a clipboard.

God, I can hear his teeth grinding even as I write this.

Now, I know it will surprise you all to find that I am a bit of a joker around the office. Yes. Me.

No, I can hear you all saying “No way, Rob! Not you! But you’re always so staid and serious all the time!”, but it’s true. I have been known to crack a smile around the workplace and then try to spread it around. Unfortunately for PW that makes him a pretty constant target for me. Fortunately for him, though, I’m pretty good at infecting him with the smile. This does, of course, ruin The Face.

I take a special bit of pride in ruining The Face, but this was not to be one of those days. Clipboard Man was sticking to PW like he was growing on the little man’s ass, and The Face was really threatening to explode. This had the side-effect of making that particular duo the focus, in a very sidelong, ‘out of the corner of your eye’ way, of the attention of everyone in the office. At one point, just as I was pulling my route down out of the sorting rack, the guy in the route next to me leaned around the rack to whisper to me, prison-style.

“Wow, they’re really sticking to him like glue! Lookit The Face! Jesus, The Little Guy doesn’t even have time to take a crap today!”

And here we see the Hand of God, that Greatest of Practical Jokers, offering to share His humor with me once more.

As I was pulling my mail out of the rack I had just sorted it into, something fell out of the upper corner of the rack where I have a bunch of official papers tucked. This was something I brought in myself at least two or three years ago to poke fun at PW and hopefully bring a smile to The Face. I had used it at the time, then apparently tucked it into the corner of my rack, though in truth I have no memory of doing so. If pressed I would have sworn I put this piece of paper in my locker, pushed safely toward the back of the high shelf in there. However this paper managed to get into my rack, it apparently lay there, forgotten and untouched for more than two years, closer to three, and never slipped loose, never pulled free from the rest of the papers stuffed in there, never fell out to flutter, leaf-like, to land face up right in front of me on my bench.

Until today.

Until just that moment.

And it was a picture. This picture:

I laughed so hard I nearly wet my pants. I laughed so hard I had to sit down, drooling on the floor amidst my guffaws.

Thank You, God.

That was not the time to share my fortuitous happenstance with PW, not while he was under the eye of Clipboard Man. But Monday. Monday I will walk in to the building armed with this story, and with the photograph, and I will do battle with The Face, and I will emerge victorious!

The Little Guy deserves a good laugh, don’t you think?

Talk to you later!

P.S. - I just had the thought that there may be some of you out there who are more sensitive than the rest of us and may have felt bad about our seeing humor in The Little Guy's misery. I'm sorry about that. I don't want you going through your day all bummed out now, so just for you I've included this picture:

You! You who just said "Awww!" I heard you! Look at the bunny! Look at it! Remember it!